Oregon's new motor-voter law drastically eases registration, but still leaves a few blind spots

The law is good policy and will remove some considerable
hurdles to voting for a large number of people. However, it does leave out
potential voters and may not in itself increase voter turnout all that much.

The bill makes voting registration automatic for any
eligible potential voter existing in the Oregon State Department of Motor
Vehicles database. This feature goes far beyond current federal requirements, which only make it mandatory to allow an eligible resident to register to vote while obtaining a driver's license or conducting business at a state DMV. According to Reuters,
the bill could expand registration by 300,000 voters – an increase of about
13.7 percent over the most recent voter roll.

That’s good news and brings Oregon’s policies much more in
line with most other industrialized democracies, which automatically register voters
whenever they move. Coincidentally, most of those countries traditionally have
had higher turnout than the United States.
Better yet is that these policies will automatically keep track of people who
tend to move around a lot and who have their registration fall through the
cracks, like younger people – particularly students – and working families.

But the law doesn’t cover everyone. People without driver’s
licenses (who often will not be in the DMV’s files) likely won’t be automatically registered; and
those individuals tend to be disproportionately poor and people of color as we
know from the battles over voter ID in numerous states.